The recent confirmation of Leonardo’s presence in Pierfrancesco di Gropparello, near Bobbio (Piacenza), discovered by a group of scientists led by Andrea Baucon of the University of Genoa and Gerolamo Lo Russo of the Natural History Museum of Piacenza, reinforces the theory in the Bobbio’s background of the Mona Lisa. The researcher Carla Glori, author of the scientific theory that locates the landscape behind the Mona Lisa as the one around Bobbio, seen from the Malaspina Dal Verme castle, underlines this in a note.
The studies that would confirm the researcher’s thesis
«The studies carried out on the ichno-fossils (fossil traces of footprints of ancient living beings) which Ansa reported last month, proved that the same shapes in the stone were studied and reproduced by Leonardo in the Leicester Codex. I have received confirmation from paleontologists that the typical ichno-fossils of Pierfrancesco are found in Bobbio, easily reachable by Leonardo on a humpback». «I wrote that that area was of great geological interest to Leonardo in 2011, but the recent discovery published by Rips, a world-class journal specializing in geology, has absolute scientific value» explains Carla Glori .
Leonardo “localized” in the Piacenza area
In recent months, the researcher had published an article on the mural drawings of the Malaspina Dal Verme castle dedicated to the jouster Galeazzo Sanseverino, patron and friend of Leonardo, assuming that the artist had at least supervised the project on site. And it is precisely from that castle that her theory places the view of the landscape of the Mona Lisa, identified as Bianca Giovanna Sforza wife of Sanseverino. But the Val Trebbia was also familiar to Leonardo “at the table”, because in his vineyard in Milan he cultivated the aromatic candia‘s Malvasia, typical of the Tidone Valley, as revealed in 2015 by the comparison of the DNA made on the native vine by the University of Agriculture from Milan.